them specially conscious of the delight of fellowship in taɛtes and interests, whether it be politics, science, literature, art, or sport; and in such circumstances the instinct, without passing the bounds of normal healthiness of tone, may rise to a degree of refined responsive sensitiveness, which is productive of a very high quality of happiness.

But of all types of humanity, those who are possessed with artistic dispositions are notoriously most liable to an absorbing thirst for sympathy, which is sometimes interpreted by those who are not artistic as a love of approbation or notoriety; and though a morbid development of the instinct may sometimes degenerate into that unhappy weakness, the almost universal prevalence of the characteristic cannot be summarily accounted for on such superficial grounds, but deserves more discriminating consideration. The reason that artistic and poetic human beings are generally characterised by such a conspicuous development of their sympathetic instincts appears to lie in the fact that they are peculiarly susceptible to beauty of some kind, whether it be the obvious external kind of beauty, or the beauty of thought and human circumstance; and that the keenness of their pleasure makes them long to enhance their own enjoyments by bringing their fellow-men sympathetically into touch with them. From this point of view the various arts of painting, sculpture, music, literature, and the rest, are the outcome of the instinctive desire to convey impressions_and_enjoyments to others, and to represent in the most attractive and permanent forms the ideas, thoughts, circumstances, scenes, or emotions which have powerfully stirred the artists' own natures. It is the intensity of the pleasure or interest the artist feels in what is actually seen or present to his imagination that drives him to utterance. The instinct of utterance makes it a necessity to find terms which will be understood by other beings in whom his appeal can strike a sympathetic chord; and the stronger the delight in the thought or feeling, the greater is the desire to make the form in which it is conveyed unmistakably clear and intelligible, But intelligibility depends to a great extent in all things upon principles of structure,

and structure implies design; hence the instinctive desire to make a thought or artistic conception unmistakably intelligible is a great incentive to the development of design.

Design has different aspects in different arts; but in all it is the equivalent of organisation in the ordinary affairs of life. It is the putting of the various factors of effect in the right places to make them tell. In some arts design seems the very essence and first necessity of existence, and though in music it is less easily understood by the uninitiated than in other arts, it is in reality of vital importance. Music indeed cannot exist till the definiteness of some kind of design is present in the succession of the sounds, The impression produced by vague sounds is vague, and soon passes away altogether. They take no permanent hold on the mind till they are made definite in relation to one another, and are disposed in some sort of order by the distribution of their up and down motion or by the regularity of their rhythmic recurrence. Then the impression becomes distinct, and its definiteness makes it permanent. In most arts it is the permanence of the enjoyment rather than that of the artistic object itself which is dependent on design. In sculpture, for instance, the very materials seem to ensure permanence; but undoubtedly a piece of sculpture which is seriously imperfect in design soon becomes intolerable, and is willingly abandoned by its possessor to the disintegrating powers of rain and frost, or to some corner where it can be conveniently forgotten. Painting does not seem, at first sight, to require so much skill in designing, because the subjects which move the artist to express himself are so obvious to all men; but nevertheless the most permanent works of the painting art are not those which are mere skilful imitations of nature, but those into which some fine scheme of design is introduced to enhance the beauty or inherent interest of the artist's thought.

In music, form and design are most obviously necessary, not only because without them the impression conveyed is indefinite and fugitive, but also because the very source and origin of its influence on human beings is so obscure. To some people beauty of form in melody or structure seems the chief excuse for the

art's existence; and even to more patient observers it seems to be on a different footing from all the other arts in respect of its meaning and intention. Even the most unsophisticated dullard can see what inspired the painter or the sculptor to express himself, but he cannot understand what music means, nor what it is intended to express; and many practical people look upon it as altogether inferior to other arts, because it seems to have no obviously useful application. Painting naturally appears to the average mind to be an imitative art; and, drawing a conclusion from two premises which are both equally false some people have gone on to suppose that the only possible basis of all arts, including music, is imitation, and to invent the childish theory that the latter began by imitating birds' songs. There is no objection to such a theory if considered as a pretty poetical myth, and instances of people imitating birds in music can of course be substantiated; but as a serious explanation of the origin of music it is both too trivial and too incompatible with fact to be worth discussing In reality, both arts are much on the same footing, for painting is no more a purely imitative art than music. People deliberately copy nature. chiefly to develop the technique which is necessary to enable them in higher flights to idealise it, and to present their imaginings in the terms of design which are their highest sanction. It is just when a painter deliberately sets himself to imitate what he sees that he least deserves the name of an artist. The devices for imitating nature and throwing the unsophisticated into ecstasies, because the results are so like what they themselves have seen, are the tricks of the trade, and, till they are put to their proper uses, are on no other footing than the work of a good joiner or a good ploughman. It is only when they are used to convey the concentrated ideals of the mind of the artist in terms of beautiful or characteristic design that they become worthy of the name of art. Music is really much on the same footing, for the history of both arts is equally that of the development of mastery of design and of the technique of expression. The only real difference is that the artist formulates impressions received through the eyes, and the musician formulates the direct expression of man's inner

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most feelings and sensibilities. In fact, the arts of painting and sculpture and their kindred are the expression of the outer surroundings of man, and music of what is within him ; and consequently the former began with imitation, and the latter with direct expression.

The story of music has been that of a slow building up and extension of artistic means of formulating in terms of design utterances and counterparts of utterances which in their raw state are direct expressions of feeling and sensibility. Utterances and actions which illustrate the raw material of music are common to all sentient beings, even to those which the complacency of man describes as dumb. A dog reiterating short barks of joy on a single note at the sight of a beloved friend or master is as near making music as the small human baby vigorously banging a rattle or drum and crowing with exuberant happiness. The impulse to make a noise as an expression of feeling is universally admitted, and it may also be noticed that it has a tendency to arouse sympathy in an auditor of any kind, and an excitement analogous to that felt by the maker of the noise. A hound that has picked up the scent soon starts the responsive sympathy of the chorus of the pack; a cow wailing the loss of her calf often attracts the attention and response of her sisters in neighbouring fields; and the uproarious meetings of cats at night afford familiar instances of the effect such incipient music is capable of exerting upon the feline disposition.

Human beings are quite equally sensitive to all forms of expression. Even tricks of manner, and nervous gestures, and facial distortions are infectious; and very sensitive and sympathetic people are particularly liable to imitate unintentional grimaces and fidgets. But sounds which are uttered with genuine feeling are particularly exciting to human creatures. The excitement of a mob grows under the influence of the shouts its members utter; and takes up with equal readiness the tone of joy, rage, and defiance. Boys in the street drive one another to extravagances by like means; and, as Cicero long ago observed, the power of a great speaker often depends not so much on what he says, as upon the skill with

which he uses the expressive tones of his voice. All such utterances are music in the rough, and out of such elements the art of music has grown, just as the elaborate arts of human speech must have grown out of the grunts and whinings of primeval savages. But neither art nor speech begins es. Bu till something definite appears in the texture of its material. Some intellectual process must be brought to bear upon both to make them capable of being retained in the mind; and the early steps of both are very similar. Just as among the early ancestors of our species, speech would begin when the indefinite noises which they first used to communicate with one another, like animals, passed into some definite sound which conveyed to the savage ear some definite and constant meaning; so the indefinite cries and shouts which expressed then feelings began to pass into music when a few definite notes were made to take the place of vague, irregular shouting, And as speech grows more copious in resources when the delicate muscles of the mouth and throat are trained to obedience in the utterance of more and more varied inflections, and the ear is trained to distinguish niceties which have distinct varieties of meaning; so the resources of music increased as the relations of more and more definite notes were established, in obedience to the development of musical instinct and as the ear learnt to appreciate the intervals and the mind to retain the simple fragments of tune which resulted.

The examination of the music of savages shows that they hardly ever succeed in making orderly and well-balanced tunes, but either express themselves in a kind of vague wail or howl, which is on the borderland between music and informal expression of feeling, or else contrive little fragmentary figures of two or three notes which they reiterate incessantly over and over again. Sometimes a single figure suffices. When they are clever enough to devise two, they alternate them, but without much sense of orderliness; and it takes a long period of human development before the irregular haphazard alternation of a few figures becomes systematic enough to have the aspect of any sort of artistic unity. Through such crude attempts at music, scales began to grow; but they developed